I'm developing an ecommerce site using ASP (VBAScript) where my catalog pages, inluding the product descriptions, are generated based on a database. Will Google and other search engines be able to spider my catalog pages? If not, what's the best workaround that I should use to have both, the dynamic site and search engine friendly catalog pages?

I heard of some workaround in PHP that changes dynamic link into static looking one...does that work? Is it worth doing it? I assume similar thing can be done in ASP....

Thank you for your help!!!

In short, yes. If you can navigate without the use of cookies, Google will be fine.

What PHP does is use either mod_rewrite or AcceptPathInfo, which are both Apache modules [well, atleast the first is a module].

mod_rewrite lets you turn "page/data1/data2" into "index.php?a=data1&b=data2" without the user ever seeing.

AcceptPathInfo accepts any data after the filename. "page/data1/data2" lets the file "page" access "data1/data2" as a variable.

How do you get just "page" without a file extension? It uses the ForceType directive, where Apache can force a file to be a certain mime type. This is very helpful, since if you change the language you use to code your pages, you won't lose search engine rankings [no variables!]

These are both worth doing if you wish to preserve search engine rankings and make the site easier to "bookmark" and the URLs easier to read. Similar things can probably be done with ASP and [I assume] IIS, but I would have no idea how.

Hope that helps!

Dan's talking about so-called "SEF" URLs, for "Search Engine Friendly". This question is coming up more and more, here's a decent recent thread:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=394979

Thank you to both of you, it's been very informative and helpfull!!!

Good information, i've often wondered about the use of cookies and the ability to index correctly. Thanks :)